I had the idea for this post after accidentally stumbling across KrakenJS and realising its a Paypal open source project.
OK so its pretty obvious companies like Google, RedHat, Oracle, etc all contribute to the open source community and even stand on its shoulders to a great extent. But after finding Paypal's contributions I did some digging to find some lesser known coroporate open source contributors. And some cool projects popped up.
There was a time when I'd do a lot of coding using Google API's and open source libraries but over the years I'd become dissillusioned with them and as a result subconciously steered clear of any future corporately sponsored projects.
# Quick KrakenJS intro before the main list
Not only is KrakenJS a much beefed up version of the Node framework ExpressJS with lads of extras including:
- Application Security
- NPM Proxy
- Dust I18N
- Dust Context
It's also a way to structure your project. It is like Sinatra's Padrino of the Ruby world.
# 1. Paypal
As I've already mentioned Paypal's greatest contribution (
- KrakenJS - As above.
- NemoJS - Selenium web driver.
- SeLion - Java test automation
- HTML5 Video Player - WTF?! (unexpected)
- AATT - Automated Accessiblity Testing Tool
- Bootstrap Accessibility Plugin
- Paypal SDKs - for accessing their platform via API.
# 2. Netflix
First it was a major banking organisation. Now we've the darling of media streaming services to the public and paraiah to US ISPs.
The Netflix open source contribution is no less impressive than PayPals - maybe even more so which is why its criminal its not more widely known. So here's a heads up on their:
Some of their notable projects:
- Asgard - Web interface for application deployments and cloud management in Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Scumblr - cool custom search engine. Check the page for full info.
- SimianArmy - Tools for keeping your cloud operating in top form.
# 3. Spotify
Some of their projects:
- Luigi - Flexible workflow and data piping library written in Python. Great docs for this project too and even has built in workflow visualisation.
- Puppet Explorer - Puppet web interface written in CoffeeScript using AngularJS.
Check out the developer blog for all their API's and SDKs.
# 4. UK Government
What? That stuffy old wood and leather palace with its yays and nays? Yep - ineed they have such a prolific open source collection on Github (19 pages of repos!) It was hard to dig out the gems. Its worth checking them all and there's some that are criminally under-appreciated. Here's a few:
- Magna Charter - Accessible, useful, beautiful barcharts from HTML tables.
- Gov.UK Styleguides - Good to see the government have style guides in place.
- Router - Just, erm. Wow. Check the readme - maybe you'll make more sense of it than me. Seems built on Go and handles routing for the main Gov.uk site.
One thing I have noticed is the UK Government does seem to like it's Ruby, esp. Ruby on Rails.
Check out the full 19 page monster list at AlphaGov.
# 5. The Guardian
The UK newspaper currently has a list of repos to rival the Government's but the potential for cool finds does seem a bit higher. Here's a few I managed to dig out:
- Prout - Looks after your pull requests, tells you when they're live.
- Alerta
- HTML Janitor - santises HTML.
- Guss Typography - Next Gen type scale and other Sass typography helpers
Of course the Guardian wouldn't be much of a newspaper without its own developer blog now would it:
If you think I've missed off any great projects let me know: doug (at) tintophat (dot) com